Trying to decompress uncompressed output with Busybox gunzip will fail even with the -cf flag passed. Steps to Reproduce ------------------ echo "uncompressed content" >> file gunzip -cf file Actual Results -------------- gunzip: invalid magic Expected Results ---------------- uncompressed content This expected behavior is given by the man page for GNU gunzip: > -f --force: If the input data is not in a format recognized by gzip, and > if the option --stdout is also given, copy the input data without change to > the standard output: let zcat behave as cat. Build date & Hardware --------------------- Unknown: I first encountered this in the biocontainers Docker images, and created the above example with the busybox:1.34.1-uclibc Docker image.